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Americans Are Unimpressed With ObamaCare

Americans remain unimpressed with the train wreck known as ObamaCare. So far, the number of people completing the cumbersome exchange signup process has not met expectations. It will continue to disappoint its supporters because the product is one that its targeted customers cannot afford and do not want.

Older, sicker people -- the kind of people who need health insurance -- are not signing up as quickly as predicted, but they are signing up at triple the rate for young, healthy people. The numbers may lead to an insurance market death spiral, as insurers raise rates to compensate, leading to even fewer healthy people signing up and rates spiraling ever higher.

Despite the community organizing efforts of the White House and its wholly owned subsidiary Enroll America, enrollment numbers continue to drop month to month.

"I guess what I would say is if you looked at that person's budget, their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill, other things that they're spending on, it may turn out that, it’s just they haven’t prioritized health care because right now everybody's healthy. Nobody actually wants to spend money on health insurance until they get sick. and then once they're sick, the costs of not having health insurance are a lot worse than the costs of having health insurance. I can guarantee you that gentleman who just wrote you that letter-- and I don't know the details of his particular situation and whether he's gotten all the information about subsidies that might be available, but I guarantee you that even at $300 a month if God forbid something happened to him or a family member where they got sick and really needed, let's say, a week's worth of hospitalization, he will wish he had paid that $300 a month.”

The president is laying out a basic economic problem, one of managing risk. The president said, "I don't know the details of his particular situation" as regards the benefits available, but government subsidies are just one tiny part of a person's economic situation. The only one who can be a fair judge of the risks involved is the person to whom they apply.

Barack Obama has been hanging out with the wealthy and powerful so long, he appears not to remember what it's like to struggle.

Approximately 30% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with little or no savings. If the car breaks down or a pipe breaks, it means being late on the electric bill and struggling to get back to square one. There literally is no money left at the end of the month. So it does not matter if health insurance is $50 per month or $300 -- it may as well be $3 million, because if the money's not there, the money isn't there.

Even if the money is there, giving it to an insurance company to prepare for a possible medical crisis means the money won't be there for the car repair, burst pipe, or any of the hundred other reasons a person needs a savings account.

All of that points to the basic problem with Obamacare. Forcing everyone to use a strictly defined, tightly controlled form of health insurance to pay for their health care, the law makes the choice for everyone, all at once, when we "don't know the details of his particular situation."

Keep in mind as we've said, all along: if you're offering people a product that makes sense for them to buy, you won't have to work that hard to sell it to them, OK?. It just doesn't make sense for a lot of these young people to spend as much as they're going to have to spend within the exchanges and get insured.

Paternally deciding for everyone that they ought to have health insurance is one thing. Restricting the market to just a particularly expensive kind of insurance is something else. In the end, even if people want health insurance, that doesn't mean they're going to want to buy yours.

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Yes, well put, thank you for your article. 10% of the people I've spoken to are satisfied with their health insurance situation. These are people with Medicare. Although I expect the Medicare landscape to change as well. I think if they rile the seniors though it will be all over for them.

This is great! I wish I had this article on hand recently while arguing with a certain Obama sycophant about the "ACA". Or even when talking to low info, well-meaning Americans who have been beaten into numbness by Obama's drivel.

More than a year after the Obama administration launched the federal ObamaCare exchange, HealthCare.gov, is still giving health insurance companies problems. Though the second open enrollment period is just days away from launching, backend systems that are supposed to communicate with insurers aren't yet finished, according to Politico:

ObamaCare is, once again, headed to the nation's highest court. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over an IRS rule that granted tax credit subsidies to states that opted not to create an ObamaCare exchange. By granting review, the Supreme Court is going against the wishes of the Obama administration, which had argued that the case, King v. Burwell, should work its way through lower courts:

A majority of HealthCare.gov and state-based exchange users say they don't plan to use the ObamaCare exchanges when the second open enrollment period begins on November 15, according to a survey conducted by BankRate.com. Experts surmise that many consumers who bought health plans on the exchanges will auto-renew, which could mean they'll end up paying more for coverage.

In September 2009, during an interview with a local Fox affiliate, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) told Coloradans that "[i]f you have an insurance policy you like, doctor or medical facility that provides medical services to you, you'll be able to keep that doctor or that insurance policy." There was no ambiguity in his statement, just the same line that was repeated by President Obama and other Senate Democrats to help sell ObamaCare to a skeptical public.

Young people who have, under the threat of a punitive tax, purchased health insurance coverage on the individual market have seen their premiums skyrocket under ObamaCare. While premiums have increased substantially for everyone, a new study shows that millennials have seen larger increases than their older counterparts:

The effects of the Affordable Care Act have been so unpleasant that it is becoming increasingly hard even to find Democrats willing to praise the law. So far, ObamaCare has done pretty much the exact opposite of everything its architects promised. But it would be naive to expect Democrats to admit their mistake outright. Instead of acknowledging the increasingly difficult to deny truth that ObamaCare is a disaster that needs to be uprooted in its entirety, the go-to talking point has become that the law just needs to be “fixed.” With the right legislative patches, they argue, we can transform this lumbering behemoth into something that can actually function.

In his 2006 book, Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, explained that "perhaps our most pressing task is to fix our broken healthcare system," adding that "the two main government-funded healthcare programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- really are broken." During the early stages of the healthcare reform debate in 2009, he again emphasized these two "broken" programs.

On October 1st of last year, ObamaCare’s inaugural enrollment period launched with all of the grace of a rocket exploding on its launch pad. Double-digit premium hikes, cancelled plans, and non-functioning websites caused misery for millions, leaving even supporters of the law lacking for words at times. This October there is silence, with few outside of the beltway focused on anything to do with ObamaCare.

Just last week the Associated Press released a survey finding that 25 percent of Americans are "not confident" that they'll be able to afford medical care in the event of a major health problem. The results underscore one of the central problems with ObamaCare, that is the high deductibles that often come with health plans on the Exchanges.

Though Healthcare.gov doesn't open for business until November 15, the spin for the second open enrollment period for ObamaCare has already begun. More than a year after the disastrous rollout of the federal Exchange, which our insurance-salesman-in-chief, President Obama, said users would have a shopping experience similar to Kayak, Orbitz, or Amazon, the administration agencies overseeing the website are already downplaying expectations: